When An Event Apart NYC Day One draws to a close, please join us for complementary cocktails sponsored by Happy Cog TM Studios
http://www.happycog.com/

http://www.gingerman-ny.com/Volcano/Volcano_1.html

Bring your lanyard (the little Event Apart name tag that hangs around your neck) and receive two tokens for two free drinks.

Fans salute the famous tequila selection at this Murray Hill local treasure, a dark homage to Malcolm Lowry's book that's a mellow retreat from the nearby frat bars: cool types like it undiscovered, though it gets busy.

-- Zagat

From Scandinavia House: Walk one block south on Park Avenue to 36th Street. Right on 36th Street. Cross Madison Avenue. Continue on 36th Street a few more steps. Under the Volcano is on the south side of 36th Street.

Posts

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As promised, continuing with my experiences from An Event Apart, here is a summary of my code critiques.
Eric Meyer, Aaron Gustafson and I performed critiques of the markup, styling, and scripting of various sites submitted for review by the attendees. There were a lot of common errors and opportunities for improvement, and some sites provided unique examples for feedback as well. I even saw some odd things in the code in a few instances that I had never seen before. From those critiques, here is a summary of 8 steps any web developer can take to improve their page code, including substeps for 2 of the 8. These are just my critiques, I'll leave it to Eric and Aaron list theirs separately if they would like.

Validate your web pages! I cannot emphasize this enough. All but one of the sites we reviewed were INVALID. How can anyone possibly expect CSS or DOM-based Javascript to work reliably with an invalid (X)HTML? Valid content will save you hours tracking down odd CSS and DOM bugs. The one site we reviewed that did validate was Piece of Cake Parties (Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional as of July 2006) and they are to be commended for it. Well done. To everyone else - shame on you for asking your site to be reviewed and not making sure it first validated. For the curious, here are some of the most common validation errors:

Unescaped ampersands (&). To be fair, this one still bites me from time to time. Be sure to keep your &amp;s lowercased as I did see an instance of a uppercased &AMP; which is invalid even in the less case-senstive HTML4.

Invalid use of camelCased attribute names in XHTML documents (e.g. onSubmit should always be onsubmit

Forms without action (attribute)

Multiple <body> elements! Seriously, people still do this? I gave that up in 1996 along with the whole "fade-in background via lots of <body bgcolor> tags" technique. Ahem.

Using target in (X)HTML Strict. If you need to use the target attribute, either stick with Transitional DOCTYPEs, or add the target attributes dynamically using semantic scripting, e.g. based on semantic class names.

Better class names. In particular lots of examples where the following should be done:

Use Context before class. E.g if you have a <ul class="nav">, you don't need a bunch of <li class="navitem">s, just use plain <li>s and a contextual CSS selector: ul.nav li.

Use lowercase classnames and IDs. I.e. avoid camelCased class names and IDs. E.g. instead of id="siteNav" use id="sitenav". You will save yourself many headaches by avoiding unintentional case-differences between uses of classes and IDs across pages and stylesheets.

In short: everyone who submitted a site for review, please read the almost four year old A Touch of Class.

Avoid presentational class names like "darkCopy", "clearFloat", "spacer", or "rightLink". For example, instead of "rightLink", use "last-link" which is more semantic, easier to read, and all lowercase. See also Class for meaning not show. (Note that if I had expanded these four steps to individual steps it would have brought the number of steps to 12 and let's just say I wasn't going to go there except in a parenthetical comment of what could have been.)

Drop excess large blocks of blank lines. Big blocks of whitespace in the code don't help anyone AFAIK. Get rid of it.

Use 'rel' and 'hreflang' for translations. Links to alternate language versions should use rel="alternate" and e.g. hreflang="es" for the Spanish version. The alternaterel value signifies an alternate version of the current page, and hreflang signifies the language of the page at the href (in contrast to the lang attribute which signifies the language of the contents of the element.).

Trim commented markup. Commented out markup should be stripped at the server. Most sites serve pages generated via PHP, Perl, Ruby etc., typically from templates. Instead of using HTML(SGML) comments <!-- --> to disable content or markup, use comments native to the language of the templates so that the disabled content is removed at the server and does not waste time or space on the network. However SGML comments are all you can do if the pages are served as static files (as this blog is).

+hCard! Last but not least, nearly every site we reviewed could use hCard to markup their contact info. Whether a university, a web design firm, an equipment manufacturer, a travel reservation service, a party service, or a comedian's website. Speaking of which, the developers of Piece of Cake Parties (yes that same site I mentioned in tip #1 that validates as XHTML 1.0) were listening to the critiques during the event, and now sport their very own hCard at the bottom of the home page including a link to add their info to your address book. They're very close too. The page's class="org" should be class="org fn", and class="url fn" should simply be class="url". With those fixes the "add to address book" link should work and produce proper vCards for desktop clients.

And speaking of a comedian's website, the developer of stevemartin.com was also listening and now Steve Martin's "contact us" page has been properly marked up with hCard and a working add to address book link. Yes, that Steve Martin. I think he might just be the first famous comedian with an hCard. Well done Alison!

And there you have it. Eight chunks of advice I gave in reference to specific sites at the Coding Critique session. Eight critiques abstracted and made generally applicable to any web page. I hope you find at least one tip that you can use to improve your site.

I disagree dolphinling. There is no supporting evidence (nor even reasoning) provided that dynamically adding a target attribute makes the document invalid. And if anything, the fact that the DOM permits you to do so without error provides evidence that it is valid to do so.

P.S. Note that your blogis INVALID due to the failure to encode double-quotes in attributes delimited by double-quotes. You may want to fix that.

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We interrupt this blogging catchup session to post a bug report and workaround. Colloquy is a very popular MacOSX irc client. Today my iBook G4 (OSX10.6.4) went into a coma instead of sleep when it was low on power, and plugging it in was not enough to revive it so I had to do a hard reboot. But after rebooting, Colloquy 2.0D16 (the recommended stable build as of this writing) would simply crash (AKA "quit unexpectedly") upon launching.

I searched both Technorati and Google and failed to find any previous report of this crash on launch problem so here you go. Reinstalling Colloquy did not help. After some tinkering I tracked it down to the "Transcript Search Index" in the "Colloquy" folder in the "Application Support" folder in the "Library" folder in my OSX user folder (aka "~" or "home" directory).

Workaround

The workaround is simple. If your Colloquy unexpectedly quits upon launch (especially if you have had to restart your mac recently without shutting down properly), then try the following:

Drag the file "Transcript Search Index" from inside ~/Library/Application Support/Colloquy/ to the Trash (yes, you can always retrieve it later if you really feel like it).

Launch Colloquy. It will automatically regenerate the index file and everything should work again. If not, check the Colloquy Trac bug database. When I managed to get Colloquy to run again, I also asked in the #colloquy channel on irc.freenode.net and was advised to try out the Colloquy 2.1 Beta which I probably will. If you're having random problems with 2.0D16, try the 2.1 Beta, and if the problems persist, file a bug.

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An Event Apart NYC was the second two day web design conference in as much as a month that very much stood apart from other web related conferences and I was very much honored to be a part of it.

What can I say, Jeffrey and Eric run a tight ship. Having worked with them informally in the past on little redesigns (ALA 2.0) and panels (SXSW) and even full day tracks (WWW2005), I knew I would enjoy working with them again. But what really impressed me was how they ran a whole conference like clockwork. They've clearly done this a few times and have a routine down. I'm sure their wonderful helpers and volunteers were key to everything running smoothly. Here is my summary, with plenty of links to specific photos from my Flickr stream for visuals to complement the words.

Beforehand

Jeffrey and Eric checked out the Scandinavia House, in particular the Victor Borge Hall (seating, projection, sound, network) the Friday before the conference and shared a brief bonding moment when all checked out ok. Fortunately Eric brought me with and I was able to capture the moment. I tested out my iBook with the projector, and took the opportunity to capture a presenter's nightmare (nothing to do with underpants or being naked, but rather having no one show up).

Lunch was delicious. This is something that the An Event Apart guys have figured out that nearly no other conference organizer has. If you're charging a four digit ticket price for a conference, crappy conference food is a total slap in the face to your paying customers. Simple economics: the marginal cost between a mediocre conference meal and a very good conference meal is probably on the order of $10 a head if that (maybe a bit more), while the marginal benefit is much happier conference attendees including a feeling that they are being treated with an expected level of quality. See Eric Meyer's excellent blog post on event pricing for more details on this and other aspects of putting on a conference.

After lunch, Khoi Vinh took us through "A Day in the Life of a Design Director", literally. I really liked the color coded month calendar he showed where each color indicated a different kind of activity. I don't remember the index but it was quite fascinating to hear him explain the various activities and how he balanced them. Khoi noted that a key aspect to being productive and still have a life was developing a daily rhythm. Jeffrey's talk on brand narratives was also quite educational. I learned a lot, even if I did disagree with some of the generalizations such as "Engineers need everything on the home page" - that's not been my experience. I (and other engineers) need things to be grouped into logical chunks as much as anyone else does. Perhaps Jeffrey was exaggerating for effect. Or perhaps I've spent too much time around designers and reading Tufte. Or perhaps both.

After a brief break we were treated to an animated exposition on Web 0.2 by none other than the infamous Ze Frank. Clever and hilarious as always. You had to be there. In the last session of the day, Eric, Jason, Jeffery and Khoi provided design critiques of a number of sites that had been submitted by attendees for review.

Day Two

Day two provided an intense journey through code, from CSS, to semantic XHTML + microformats, to DOM and scripting. Eric Meyer walked us through numerous intermediate and advanced CSS techniques that can be used to make your CSS smaller (fewer rules), and your (X)HTML smaller as well (e.g. by reducing the number of classes). After Eric, I provided a freshly updated intro and overview of What are microformats? with numerous practical examples of microformatted markup built from scratch. In particular, this latest presentation ( blogs discussing the presentation) has brand new examples that demonstrate how to author an hCalendar event, and an hCalendar event with a nested hCard location. This was my most jam-packed microformats presentation yet, and somehow I still managed to get through it in about 40-45 minutes and have time for some Q&A. The crowd asked excellent questions which always help make the best presentations because everyone learns more. After Q&A and the traditional switching laptops dance, Eric Meyer presented on the "One True Layout". This has been discussed quite a bit so I won't go into details.

Lunch was once again excellent. The Sponsor Giveaways got everyone to return quickly to the auditorium. Aaron Gustafson's presentation So You Wanna be a DOM Star provided a step-by-step approach to not only developing scripting and DOM expertise in general, but also the relatively modern approaches of unobtrusive scripting, graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, objects, and creating APIs. After such an intense series of coding sessions, Jeffrey told some very nice stories about the origins of his book, Designing With Web Standards, and what went into the second edition.

In the final session of the first An Event Apart New York City, Eric Meyer, Aaron Gustafson and myself performed live code critiques, again on sites submitted from the attendees. I won't repeat the specific critiques we made of each site here. Instead, in my next post I'll provide a list of the most common feedback that I gave in general, which I hope will be useful to web designers and developers in general. Stay tuned.

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I think my life has been on fast-forward for the past few weeks, well, if the photos are any evidence. And this is after the maximum event packing that I noted earlier. That photo at the start of this post is one of those surreal photos you can take at dusk where it is still light outside and yet the streetlamps glow brightly. Add a palm tree, a light-dotted bay bridge, and a view from a MUNI stop and the cliché is complete. Wish you were here. More photo "sets":

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In addition to using the hReview creator to publish reviews of businesses (like restaurants) and products (like specific dishes at a restaurant), you can also review events (like concerts, conferences, or even fitness classes). Note that when you review an event, you should also markup the event with hCalendar, and ideally markup the location of the event as an hCard. Here are a few more reviews from my trip to New York City.

0.3

Excellent intermediate yoga by Jenny Pommiss

Having checked out Clay a few days before, I decided to try out the 90 minute Vinyasa II yoga class. Jenny Pommiss led the session. It was superb. This was only my second yoga class ever, but inspite of that I was able to do most of the positions without much difficulty, thanks to years of doing yoga videos by Rodney Yee and Kristin McGee (whom Jenny was subbbing for).

Jenny started the session with some simple conscious breating and then went through several warm up poses and flowing series. The more challenging poses followed, with a bunch of stretching and calming poses as well. Throughout the entire session she gave everyone encouraging instructions, and went around the room and helped people by adjusting their positions etc.

The 90 minutes flew by before I knew it and at the end I was very warm, just a bit tired yet wide awake, and overall had a feeling of calm happiness.

Jenny is an excellent instructor. If you like yoga and are in the New York City area, I strongly recommend you try a class with her. I spoke with her briefly afterwards and asked if she had a mailing list or blog, and the answer is not yet. So for now, just keep checking for mentions of Jenny Pommiss, and we'll see about getting her setup with a blog.

Fun, informal, tasty dining at Live Bait

★★★★☆ That evening I attended the pre- An Event Apart speakers dinner along with a bunch of the usual suspects and their families at "Live Bait". I believe I also had a salmon salad there though I can't seem to find it on the menu, perhaps it was a special. I remember it being very tasty and filling too (no problem with the portion size). The environment was fun, casual, and they easily accommodated a decent sized group without difficulty (there were more than 10 of us, including two toddlers running around). The prices were very reasonable, the service friendly and quick, and the food excellent. Would definitely go there again.

The next day was the first day of An Event Apart NYC and the An Event Apart NYC Happy Hour. After a pineapple juice and some conversation with attendees, I ducked out about 7:15pm (just minutes before it was scheduled to end anyway) and cabbed it over to Clay to do another workout. Yes, on this trip I deliberately bucked the usual lapse in exercise that happens to me on most other conference trips. Plus I had the chance to take a class from one of the instructors of the DVDs which have helped me improve my fitness over the years, how was I to pass that up?

0.3

Kristin McGee's Pilates Mat class worked my body and mind

I have never taken a pilates class before. My only experiences with pilates consisted of the 5 minute mini-pilates-workout at the end of the MTV Power Yoga DVD, and the MTV Pilates DVDs, both of which I have been doing off and on for the past several months. All of which are taught by Kristin McGee. One of the DVDs had mentioned that she taught in person in New York City, so I figured it would be good to look up her classes, and try one out to get some in-person experience and feedback.

The class was awesome. Kristin warmed us up at what felt like just the right pace and took us through a number of the exercises that I was familiar with from the DVDs. We did several exercises that I had never seen before as well. She had a really good instinct for how far and fast she could push the class both in terms of strength and concentration, as many of the positions and moves required a decent amount of balance and focus in addition to strength. Being someone who's mind likes to stay active at nearly all times, I very much enjoyed the fact that the moves required physical and mental concentration. I certainly felt like I had been worked to my limits, and judging from looking around the room, I certainly wasn't the only one.

That's something you don't get from DVDs. Everyone on a DVD is keeping up with the instructor without difficulty, and when you're first learning, it can be very intimidating. But in the real world environment of a class room with other real world attendees, when you can actually stretch and hold positions longer or better than at least a few other folks around you, you suddenly realize that you're actually not bad. And for my first pilates class ever I felt like I did quite well. Kristin's positively worded instructions and encouraging happy tone of voice helped a lot.

By the end I felt like my whole body was "singing", I could feel all my muscles and yet was not sore. In addition, I had gained a sense of mental calm and clarity that was more than I had felt in quite some time. Afterwards I asked Kristin if she could sign some of her DVDs (which as a good fanboy I had brought with me) and she graciously obliged.

What else can I say? Kristin McGee rocks. I have tremendous admiration and respect for famous (or even micro-famous) people who are approachable, nice, and just plain human in person and Kristin is no exception. She is not only a great instructor, but an incredibly kind and friendly person as well.

If you're in New York City go take one of her classes and get worked. I certainly plan to do so again and hopefully I'll get a chance to participate in one of her yoga classes the next time I visit.

Chez Laurence has very good eats, fast service, and is reasonably priced.

July 19, 2006 by
Tantekbusiness

Chez Laurence Bistro

245 Madison Ave.

New YorkNY,
10016

★★★★☆ After that workout I was starving and a quick phone call to Eric later I was on my way to join dinner in progress at Chez Laurence. In brief, despite the fact that I was late to join the party, they promptly took my order, and brought my food quickly before others had finished their desserts. Thanks very much to the Media Temple guys for taking us out by the way. Go check out their web hosting services.

Minor quibble with Chez Laurence, they shut off their espresso machine 15 minutes or more before closing time which itself was on the early side for New York City. It was ok though I didn't really need an espresso that late at night, and especially not after the incredibly energizing work-out that I had just had.

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Last week when I was visiting the city that never sleeps, I got somewhere between 2-4 hours a night. Lots of input. This is the kind of environment that I thrive. So much going on no chance of being bored. And yet it wasn't as crowded on the streets as I remember from last time. Lots of new people, events, conversations, food, etc. I'm going to try posting a few reviews at a time to see how that works.

0.3

Rare View serves a good but pricey salmon salad with fair service

July 18, 2006 by
Tantekproduct

Rare View salmon salad

★★★☆☆I had a late brunch on July 8th at "Rare View" which is located in the bottom floor of the Shelburne Murray Hill Hotel. The odd thing was they didn't want to seat anyone until 5pm which was a bit annoying, so I had to wait in the bar and drank a pineapple juice to pass the time. Once I got seated the service was ok. The salmon salad itself was pretty good. The grilled salmon came hot, cooked just right, and quite tasty, although the portions were quite small. So it was good, but not $15.50 (before tax) good.

Starbucks in NY efficient and reliable

★★★★☆Regarding that low amount of sleep, after the late lunch on the 8th I walked up a couple of short blocks to the Starbucks at 40th and Lex. Clean interior with familiar decorations. Plenty of seating. Some sort of calm but forgettable music wafting from hidden speakers. The server made my iced venti non-fat light-ice latte quickly and the espresso/milk balance was just like I like it. I also grabbed a slice of lemon loaf to go to snack on late into the night.

Rare View's expensive veggie burger barely edible

July 18, 2006 by
Tantekproduct

Rare View veggie burger

★★☆☆☆I was in a bit of a rush for lunch on the 9th so I figured I would grab a veggie burger (a safe bet in California) from Rare View. It was big, no problem with portion size there. However, the mish mash of what they put into the massive veggie burger patty left a lot to be desired. I was so hungry that I was able to eat about half of the veggie burger before it dawned on me that I didn't really like how it tasted. So much so that I couldn't finish it. The burger was served with a lower east side "Gus's" pickle which was just about the nastiest dill pickle I have ever tasted. It had a real bad musky aftertaste. Stay away from "Gus's" pickles.

The food was either ok, or poor, but expensive. The service was slow. They seemed to have a bit of an attitude. I expect much more from a hotel restaurant, especially in New York City. For anyone visiting the Shelburne Murray Hill, I can only recommend that you inform yourself with other nearby eating options, and avoid the Rare Bar & Grill.

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Driving back in the early morning hours in Ryan King's car (having stayed up all night blogging and coding at SuperHappyDevHouse2), I related to Ryan (and I think either Chris or Andy or both were in the car as well) howmuchfun I had at FooCamp in 2004 and the fact that I had not (yet apparently) been invited to attend in 2005 and how I felt about that. Knowing that the focus and content of FooCamp were mostly attendee driven, armed with a plethora of photos from previous FooCamps, and inspired by the scrappy can-do attitude of events like SuperHappyDevHouse and Webzine2005 which were both openly or at least semi-openly organized by volunteers, I asked the rhetorical question: "Why don't we do our own FooCamp?" followed shortly thereafter with something like "We could call it BarCamp and make it open."

Everyone liked the idea, nobody had the time. Ryan and I were busy with various projects at Technorati, and Chris and Andy were busy working hard on a release of Flock for OSCON 2005.

Many weeks went by and deadlines passed. Projects were completed, alphas launched, and conferences convened. But as everyone knows, you cannot kill an idea.

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I've been visiting my sister Ayşan here in New York (Brooklyn specifically) for the past few days, and had the occasion to sample a few restaurants, cafes, and one yoga studio. In the interest of exercising the hReview creator, shaking out any remaining bugs (and UI awkwardness), and demonstrating that a structured review is not just another form of blog post, rather, it's a method of embedding one or more reviews in addition to other information into any kind of web page including a blog post, here are some hReviews:

0.2

Franny's is a good place for organic snacks and pizzas

★★★★☆
I had dinner at Franny's with my sister Ayşan the other night. Their friendly service and hip atmosphere made us instantly comfortable. Both their frittata and salad with pine-nut dressing were exceptionally tasty. The wood fired pizzas were good but not great. There is a small bar and window seating to watch the Flatbush foottraffic. I definitely recommend checking it out if you are in the hood. I found some nearby open wifi which worked fairly deep in the restaurant.

0.2

Superb organic smoothies at the CLAY Café

★★★★★
The CLAY Café has a great variety of healthy choices - from bitesize snacks, to smoothies made with all organic fruit, to frittata and sandwiches. I had a strawberry and banana smoothie with whey protein and multivitamin additions, and Ayşan tried the Chai smoothie. Both were excellent, very flavorful, and quite filling (I think they were approximately 20-24 oz.). The servers were very nice and helpfully answered all our questions. Adjacent to the cafe is a very cozy fireplace lounge (you have to see it to believe it). Did I mention that Clay also provides open wifi?

One catch: you have to be a member of the Clay Fitness in order to enjoy the café and lounge. Though if you show up and request a tour, and afterwards ask very nicely if you could sample the café, they might let you do so.

0.2

Ok yoga center, need to try another instructor

★★★☆☆
Jivamukti is a fairly well known Yoga center with locations in Munich, London, Toronot, Detroit, and of course New York on the Upper East Side and in Union Square, which is the location Ayşan and I tried out.

We specifically attended the "Beginner Vinyasa" class which apparently had a new instructor this month.

The class was 90 minutes long and included many positions and stretches that I was quite familiar with. It was my first actual yoga class (having done only DVDs up to that point), and I definitely appreciated the corrections in posture and position that the instructor, Shanna AKA "Lakshmi" provided. The pacing was quite good as well.

There were some aspects I didn't really care much for however. I've never been into the mystical side of yoga, and I could have done without "om" chants at the start and finish. I find that a little moment of silence, some peace and quiet, perhaps light flute music (Kung Fu style), or some nice ambient electronica provides a nice context for relaxed focus.

In addition, the instructor chose to tell us some anecdotes about injuries she incurred due to "bad yoga teachers", as well as a story about how yoga helped purify the body of an old man as evidenced by the purity of his post cremation ashes. My natural reaction to FUD is to treat it as yet another marketing technique (why would a yoga instructure use fear? that's very much against the supposed philosophy). And pseudo-scientific stories have no place in anything fitness related. Shanna clearly had plenty of personal issues or sources of pain to deal with, and it very much negatively impacted the overall tone of the class. In addition, anyone who believes in any kind of pseudo-science has no place being a health or fitness professional.

Overall the Jivamukti studio was fair, the changing areas were small and not very private. The organic cafe was nice and well lit with large windows on two sides with happy helpful workers as well, though we didn't sample any of the eats. They looked good though. I would try another class here however, or even the same class with a different instructor.

0.2

Quick and tasty eats reasonably priced

July 7, 2006
by Tantekbusiness

Cafe 55

914 3rd Avenue

New York,
NY10022

+1.212.935.5100

★★★★☆
Cafe 55 at the corner of 55th Street and 3rd Avenue has quite a selection of prepared dishes ready to eat. They had everything from simple muffins, common rice cripy streats, fruit loops treats (which I had never seen before), to various cold dishes, hot dishes such as tuna steak, salmon with red peppers, baked chicken, roast beef, and sides like four cheese mac-n-cheese, vegetable mashed potatoes (also had never seen before), rice pilaf, a selection of four soups, you name the ingredients salad, and even sushi. In addition, the drink selection was better than expected for a corner takeout cafe, including several refrigerated juices such as my personal favorite, ruby red grapefruit.

I had the salmon with red peppers, four cheese mac-n-cheese and vegetable mashed potatoes. The salmon was better than expected - cooked through but still flaky to the touch. The mac-n-cheese was exquisite (as mac-n-cheese goes), and the vegetable mashed potatoes was the best green goop I've had in a while.

Afterwards, if you're in the mood for some soft serve, Tasti-D-Lite is just a couple of doors down. You wouldn't believe how many conversations can be stopped and stares invoked with something as simple as a chocolate chip topped vanilla soft serve on a hot and humid summer Manhattan day.

0.2

Brooklyn Burrito Bar delivers decent dinner

★★★☆☆
Initially I resisted trying this place out, but Ayşan convinced and I'm glad she did. The service was sometimes a little slow, but everything else was definitely far better than expected for Mexican food in Brooklyn. They brought out chips and salsa as any decent Mexican restaurant shoul (we had to request refills though). I had the Salmon Loco burrito which was superb. Even the veggie refried beans and Spanish rice on the side were tasty. Ayşan's veggie fajitas came sizzlin' hot as they should, with a healthy side dish of fixin's. If you're a California expat and aching for something resembling Mexican food, you could do far worse than eat at the Burrito Bar on Flatbush. Don't expect it to be spicy. Me, I'm still aching for migas, which I have yet to find outside of Las Manitas in Austin, TX.

0.2

Penelope serves up creative fare simply and with a nice attitude

★★★★☆
On Jeffrey's recommendation, Eric and I walked down to Penelope (cafe bakery bar) for a very late lunch. Their veggie burger was quite tasty, and different, being served on an English muffin. I asked for Fontina cheese for additional creativity. Service was very friendly and prompt. I'd like to go back and try some of their other dishes. Eric and I passed on dessert which included a selection of cute namesake "pennie" cupcakes in the hopes of restoring some appetite in time for dinner.

0.2

Good spinach salad and garlic bread

July 7, 2006
by Tantekbusiness

Vezzo Thin Crust Pizza

178 Lexington Avenue

New York City,
NY

+1.212.839.8300

★★★★☆
For me, dinner at Vezzo consisted of a tasty spinach salad (mozzarella substituted for the default goat cheese) and sampling of the cheese garlic bread. Both were very good, everyone else seemed to enjoy the pizza which I'll have to try some time. Funniest thing we saw - on the outside window, under their name was the text "Est. 2006". I suppose everybody has to start somewhere, or sometime. I like the optimism in such a statement. They're planning on being around for a while.

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On this Independence day, one particular thought of independence has been overwhelming the quiet moments. No, it is not work related (in spite of the spate of rumors spread by a certain nutcase about two months ago). No, the thoughts are not happy. No I don't see any hope for a change, nor any flaws with the reasoning behind the decision.

Six days later, and the feelings are still empty. As empty as a baby's sudden brief moment of pindrop silence, mouth wide open, eyes scrunched, tears welling up, inhaling. The scream is coming and there is nothing you can do about it.

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After burning real hard through the past 2+ weeks, it was nice to spend some time with family yesterday. My parents drove up from LA to my sister Aytek's place, and it was truly wonderful to see them, Steve, and of course little Devran too. In a couple of days I'll be in New York and get to see my younger sister Ayşan for a few days before jumping into the thick of An Event Apart activities and sessions. Though these past few weeks have brought forth some incredible accomplishments, unfortunately, they also brought forth some personal sadness. I didn't really have the chance to talk with my family about it. Perhaps the flight to New York will provide some quiet time for introspection, and Ayşan has always provided excellent perspective as well.

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Somehow I got involved in planning, organizing, speaking or helping out with seven events over the course of two weeks. Let's see if I can at least list them with some links.

6/13 Where 2.0, specifically the Directions Microformat BOF (with notes to be incorporated into the wiki, and I just realized that somehow the photos didn't get uploaded to Flickr. I'll have to go dig those up. Update, found and uploaded them.)

6/23-6/25 BarCampSanFrancisco - as a planner and participant along with several others. A big thanks to all BarCampSF planners and volunteers especially to Nima Dilmaghani of Microsoft for pushing and bending so much to make the facilities work for BarCamp. But most of all, one particular BarCampSF planner went far beyond the call of duty in her initative and leadership, and that was Tara Hunt. If you had a good time at BarCampSF, there's a good chance it was directly related to Tara's leadership and non-stop hands-on involvement during the BarCamp itself. Thanks Tara!

Whew! The second half of June was quite intense. Many thanks to everyone involved with all those events for making them run as smooth as they did.